The Real Russia. Today.

Snow, trash, and ‘influential people’

Friday, February 11, 2022

• New podcast episode: Thirty years of U.S. ambassadors in Moscow
• The St. Petersburg governor’s troubles
• Team Navalny’s diabolical logos
• Opinion and analysis: Evgeny Savostyanov endorses a call for Putin’s resignation, Michael McFaul offers a peace plan in Europe, Andrey Sushentsov explains the ‘temporal’ dissonance in U.S.-Russian relations, and Volodymyr Ishchenko says the Western MSM gets it all wrong on Ukraine

🎧 The Naked Pravda: The Ambassadorial Series (28 minutes)

Meduza spoke to the two hosts of a special project organized by the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. In roughly 16 hours of interviews, “The Ambassadorial Series” features in-depth conversations with eight of the living former U.S. ambassadors to Russia and the Soviet Union, each featuring personal reflections and recollections on high-stakes negotiations, as well as discussions about a range of geopolitical issues that still dog today’s relations between Moscow and Washington.

The Naked Pravda asked the two women who hosted the interviews, Jill Dougherty (an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, a fellow at the Wilson Center, and CNN’s former Moscow bureau chief) and Dr. Hanna Notte (a senior research associate at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non‑Proliferation), what they learned from talking to the ambassadors who represented America in Moscow over the past three decades.

⌛ St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov is under more pressure than ever before. Is his departure imminent? (12-min read)

For St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov, 2022 didn’t get off to a good start. The politician, who has faced near-constant criticism for his poor handling of the coronavirus epidemic, has now proven inept at resolving issues related to snow and garbage removal. What’s more, it seems as though local residents aren’t the only ones getting fed up with Beglov — St. Petersburg’s elites are losing patience with him, too. With Alexander Beglov under more pressure than ever, Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev looks into whether his departure is imminent and who might take up his post.

⚖️ This 22-year-old has become Russia’s go-to expert witness in court cases launched over prohibited symbols — like Team Navalny’s logo (4-min read)

In June 2021, the Moscow City Court declared Alexey Navalny’s political movement and anti-corruption nonprofits “extremist organizations.” Since then, the Russian authorities have been busy launching administrative cases against the Kremlin critic’s supporters for “displaying banned symbols” — including, but not limited to, logos associated with Team Navalny. Because Russia doesn’t maintain a list of extremist symbols, these proceedings rely on assessments from expert witnesses. According to lawyers and human rights activists, Russian courts have recently been turning to one witness in particular — 22-year-old Danila Mikheev, a purported forensic expert who has been denouncing opposition activists since his university days.

Opinion and analysis

✍️ (Interview) Retired FSB general endorses veterans’ group leader’s letter warning against Ukraine invasion, though he also says an offensive is unlikely

In an interview with Republic, retired FSB General Evgeny Savostyanov explains his public support for a recent letter from All-Russian Officers Assembly chairman Leonid Ivashov calling for President Putin’s resignation and an end to the military escalation in Ukraine. Savostyanov says he believes Russia’s officer corps is worried that Putin isn’t getting good intelligence about the difficulties of a military campaign in Ukraine and is looking at the situation “through rose-colored glasses.” He says he fears that invading Ukraine could prove as disastrous for Russia as the invasion of Afghanistan was for the USSR. So far, he says, Moscow’s military interventions in Crimea and the Donbas have cost more than they have gained, while simultaneously diminishing Russia’s capacity to balance between China and the West.

At the same time, however, Savostyanov admits to having no contact with active troops or security officials. He also says he does not actually consider a Russian offensive in Ukraine to be likely (he places the odds at “no more than 15 percent”). Though he argues that NATO presents no current threat to Russia, Savostyanov characterizes Ukrainian membership in the alliance as a strategic shift, especially if the West ever deploys missiles there that are capable of reaching Moscow within a few minutes. Russia’s current concentration of troops near the Ukrainian border, he says, is likely linked to preparations for fortifications in response to NATO enlargement (not an invasion of Ukraine).

🕊️ (Opinion) The West can pursue a ‘grand bargain’ with Russia without sacrificing its ‘moral high ground’

In an article for Foreign Affairs, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul argues that President Biden should counter Russia’s ultimatum demanding a revised European security architecture with a “Helsinki 2.0,” which he describes as “a comprehensive, grand bargain for enhancing European security.” McFaul proposes “cheap pageantry” and “an international platform that Putin does not deserve” that would focus mainly on revamping broken security agreements and pursuing a few new deals on arms and troops in Europe, including “more frequent monitoring of troop deployments, weapons deployments, and military exercises,” “notifications about training,” “new limits on the scale and locations of exercises,” sharing missile launch data, limiting missile defenses, restricting nuclear weapons, and more. In all these bargains, McFaul argues that reciprocity and verification are crucial. He also suggests that Moscow might agree to withdraw troops from Transnistria and the Donbas if the West lifts existing restraints under a resuscitated Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe on Russian troop movements between Russia’s own flanks.

McFaul stresses the need to overcome “a fixation on nonstarters” (for example, Moscow’s demands for a NATO-expansion moratorium, and the West’s insistence on Russian withdrawal from Crimea), arguing that “negotiators could make progress by focusing on other issues and then embedding intractable problems into a larger deal.” This could create opportunities that are currently unavailable, he says.

The former U.S. ambassador also emphasizes the Putin regime’s “immorality,” accusing the Russian authorities of election interference, kidnapping enemies, and violating OSCE declarations by trying to assassinate Alexey Navalny and other “European citizens.” “To sort through the legitimacy of complaints” about security threats and foreign meddling, McFaul suggests an independent arbitration tribunal, which he admits will “not be effective,” though he says it could “build momentum and perhaps find value in the future.”

Engaging “Putin’s illegal, belligerent behavior” is an unfortunate reward, acknowledges Ambassador McFaul, but it is better than the alternative of Putin’s continued efforts to “stoke divisions, tensions, and conflicts” absent “a new security deal.”

🕊️ (Interview) Russia can keep this up, all day

Speaking to Julia Ioffe at Puck News, Russian foreign policy expert Dr. Andrey Sushentsov warns that NATO expansion has resulted in Washington adopting the “maximalist stances” of Russia’s neighbors, leading the U.S. to exaggerate the threat from Russia. The current crisis in Ukraine, he says, is overdue, but it seems sudden to Washington because Russia and the West “live in different temporal categories” (Western geopolitics, he says, “is tied to internal electoral cycles,” while Russian geopolitical time “is measured in epochs”).

The current military buildup outside Ukraine, says Sushentsov, “is all a way of demonstrating to the West the risks of ignoring Russian interests.” “I think the point,” he explains, “was more to show that Russia could create tension on its western border at any moment, whenever it wants, without violating anything in the process.” In terms of proximate causes, Sushentsov cites recent provocations involving the British Navy, Turkish-made drones in the Donbas, and a French plane over the Black Sea.

Sushentsov characterized Ukraine itself as a “ticking time bomb,” arguing that the marginalization of Russian speakers is about more than minority rights because “Russians are one of the two pillars of Ukrainian statehood.” Internally, Ukraine is “very heterogenous and prone to conflict,” particularly when it comes to “a consensus on foreign policy,” he says.

Asked about how the current crisis might end, Sushentsov warns that it is likelier to be “exhausted” than resolved. At the same time, he says the Russian military is capable of maintaining pressure near the border “as long as it needs to be to get a political resolution.” “In general, this isn’t very expensive,” he claims. “Creating this kind of news cycle isn’t very expensive.”

📊 (Interview) The West’s ‘establishment media’ is all wrong about Ukraine

In an interview with Jacobin magazine, Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko warns that the Western “media campaign about the imminent [Russian] invasion” of Ukraine “should not be taken as an objective reflection of Russian actions” and “also has this reinforcing, escalating character” that he suspects is aimed primarily at urging German officials to align more closely with Berlin’s NATO allies. The media campaign, says Ishchenko, “has had very material and negative consequences for the Ukrainian economy,” particularly in the real estate market.

Ishchenko spends much of the interview emphasizing that political consensus within Ukrainian society is weak and the “nation-building project has not succeeded fully.” He also argues that the discussion about national identity “occupies just a small part of Ukrainian society, intellectuals especially.” Polling indicates that the most important issues remain “jobs, wages, and prices,” not “identity, language, geopolitical relations, the EU, Russia, and NATO.” Ishchenko argues that the public is unhappy about the Minsk accords (because they have failed to bring peace in the Donbas), but this doesn’t mean “that most Ukrainians find them inherently unacceptable.”

According to Ishchenko, “the role of radical nationalists in Ukrainian politics is significant” mainly insofar as “radical nationalist parties” are the only groups in the country that have effectively synthesized ideology and managed real “street mobilization,” including “resources for violence.” “Most of the relevant [political] parties,” however, “are actually electoral machines for specific patron-clientelistic networks” for whom “ideologies are usually totally irrelevant,” says Ishchenko.

Yours, Meduza